NVIDIA Corp. on Tuesday announced a $249 generative artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer, its cheapest model to date as its rivals race to market.
The NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit is the ultimate stocking stuffer for the holidays. It fits in the palm of a hand, packing GenAI capabilities for hobbyists, students and commercial developers for $249, down from an earlier version priced at $499.
“Look at this. I think I might have cooked this a little bit too long. It shrunk,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said in a brief video from his new house, introducing the device after retrieving it from an oven. “A long time ago, we created a robotics processor and we imagined one day that these deep-learning models would evolve, and we would have robots of all kinds.”
The Jetson Orion Nano is an incremental upgrade that packs a leap in performance to 67 Sparse TOPS (up from 40 TOPS) and 33 Dense TOPS, as well as a bump in memory bandwidth to 102GB/s (up from 68GB/s), according to NVIDIA. “Whether creating LLM (large language model) chatbots based on retrieval-augmented generation, building a visual AI agent, or deploying AI-based robots, the Jetson Orin Nano Super is an ideal solution to fetch,” NVIDIA said.
The developer kit includes a Jetson Orin Nano 8GB system-on-module (SoM) and a reference carrier board, providing a platform for prototyping edge AI applications. Jetson runs NVIDIA AI software such as NVIDIA Isaac for robotics, NVIDIA Metropolis for vision AI, and NVIDIA Holoscan for sensor processing.
SoM is powered by NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture GPU with specialized tensor cores and a six-core Arm CPU, enabling multiple AI application pipelines to run concurrently while delivering high-performance inference.
The developer kit is likely to seed NVIDIA technology among developers and students, weaning them on the platform and establishing mind share as Apple Inc. did with Macintosh developers in the 1980s and ’90s.
News of NVIDIA’s latest palm-sized GenAI-powered supercomputer comes nearly two weeks after AWS, Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing arm, said it’s building one of the world’s most powerful AI supercomputers with Anthropic.
According to Amazon, the supercomputer, named Project Rainier, will feature hundreds of thousands of Amazon’s latest AI training chip, Trainium 2. It is expected to be completed sometime in 2025.
